Last Night’s TV: Ian Hislop: When Bankers Were Good

This perky film charted past acts of philanthropy in banking families. But why do bankers now give away so little?

Ian Hislop: When Bankers Were Good

BBC Two

Reading the letters of Charles Dickens the other day, in particular those written while he was ditching his wife, I failed to ask myself why the good opinion of Angela Burdett-Coutts was so important to him. On When Bankers Were Good, Ian Hislop explained that she was the most famous woman in Britain and maybe the most intriguing. Her inheritance from her grandfather, the founder of Coutts Bank, was so large that a newspaper calculated that if laid out in crowns it would stretch 113 miles. It also came with a codicil that she would lose it…